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Robert Sarvis, who earned 6.5 percent of the vote as the Libertarian Party candidate for governor in the November 2013 election, has announced that he will seek the Virginia LP's nomination for U.S. Senate in the upcoming election.

"The Libertarian convention is Feb. 8 in Richmond, and I've recently told the Libertarian Party folks that I will be seeking their nomination," Sarvis said.

Sarvis spoke for a few minutes about the difficult process of ballot qualification, a process that may have become a thing of the past if he'd received a few more percentage points in November's election.

"Anybody who's not a Republican or Democrat and already on the ballot has to get 10,000 signatures of valid Virginia voters, including 400 from each congressional district," Sarvis said. "So that actually requires handing in at least 15,000, more like 17,000 to 18,000, to make sure that you actually get enough valid signatures. And it just takes a long time and a lot of resources. ... That just kind of delays the start of the true campaigning."

He also spoke briefly about his potential campaign platform.

"It's a relatively new decision to go ahead and run, so I haven't settled on the most important themes, but I think everybody recognizes the need to bring a lot of policy back home," Sarvis said. "The federal government's doing too much, it's not doing it well, it's arguably incompetent at a lot of these things, and we're moving in the wrong direction on issue after issue. ... Obviously, health care is going to be one. Ending the drug war, I made a big point of that at the state level, in the governor's race. I'll be doing that again in the federal race. We see a lot of movement at the state level."

The Libertarian Party is America's third largest political party, founded in 1971. Our vision is for a world in which all individuals can freely exercise the natural right of sole dominion over their own lives, liberty and property by building a political party that elects Libertarians to public office, and moving public policy in a libertarian direction.